Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Colour sensitivity	Excellent
Resolution	Excellent
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Superb quality images and amazing ICE dust removal
Disadvantages:	Poor user interface & price (especially for the optional APS adaptor)

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I bought this scanner last year, having finally got round to sorting out our wedding photos. We'd decided not to bother with a professional photographer and instead asked everyone to send us the negatives of their own photos. In the meantime, my old 35mm camera died, and I had decided to get a digital camera. What a revelation. I then decided that the only sensible way to sort out and edit our wedding photos was to get the negatives scanned into digital format.
After a fair bit of research, I finally decided to get the Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED. All the reviews I read suggested a good balance between cost and performance, and I can confirm this.
The scanner cost $1065 or about £600 from a US company called Cameta Camera who were selling the scanner new on ebay.
When it arrived, it was very easy to install and get working, and came with the adaptors to allow me to scan both standard 35mm film and also slides. In order to scan APS films (sometimes known as IX240), I had to purchase an extra adaptor, which cost a further £77 second-hand, again on ebay. £77 seemed a ridiculous amount of money for this adaptor, but it's around half what Nikon are charging for a brand new one! Unbelievable!!
Anyway, 12 months later, and I've now scanned a lot of negatives (no slides though), and the scanner has been perfect. There's no point my listing all the technical detail about this scanner, the main feature is that it produces very high resolution scans (up to 4000 dpi) which can then be saved in a variety of file formats e.g. JPEG or TIFF. Some of the file sizes can be HUGE - up to 200MB per photo, so make sure you've got a decent size hard drive if you're planning to do a lot of scanning. The print quality from these scanned images is excellent, even big enlargements, and any problems seen on the prints (poor focus, grainy appearance etc.) are down to the original photo, not the scanner.
I've also found that some old sets of prints which appeared to be out of focus or have a strange colour tint were actually not printed properly by the processor the first time round, and that the scanned digital images are much better than the original prints.
This scanner has lots of bells and whistles, all accessed via the user interface (more about this below), but by far the most amazing feature is the automatic removal of dust and scratches from the negatives. You don't fully appreciate how good this is till you disable this option, and you can then see the truly appalling state of some of your negatives. If you're looking to buy a scanner, I reckon this correction feature is absolutely vital. Nikon use a technology called Digital ICE, which I believe they license from a third-party. Other scanner manufacturers also offer something similar. It bumps up the price, but don't even think about buying a scanner without this facility.
A couple of other useful features are GEM, which will correct for particularly grainy film, and ROC, which restores faded colour. However, I've found that these need to be adjusted on a frame by frame basis (which is very time consuming), so they are only really any good for tweaking that special one-off old photo that you want to get just right before having it printed onto mousemats to hand out at your boss's 60th birthday...
Talking of time consuming, the speed of the scanner is supposed to be pretty good when measured against the opposition, but then I've nothing to compare it against so I can't really comment. I know it takes me about an hour to scan a full 36 frame film, although this can be reduced considerably by turning down the resolution and disabling some of the aforementioned bells and whistles.
Now, about the user-interface. To operate the scanner, you turn it on (the on-off button is the only button on the scanner itself), make sure it's connected to your computer, and then start the Nikon scanning application on your PC. This opens a user interface through which you control all the features of the scanner. I understand it's also possible to control the scanner directly from applications like Adobe Photoshop, but I haven't tried this. I suspect you'd need more RAM in your computer than they have at NASA.
You then feed a strip of your negatives into the scanner (and make sure you put them in the right way round - face up and feet towards the left side). The scanner does a quick scan of the whole strip, and shows you a set of thumbnails of the photos as positives (not negatives). You then select some or all of the photos to scan, select a scan setting (which dictates things like resolution, rotation, file type etc etc), and hit 'scan'. The scanner and PC then do their stuff, and your scanned image(s) will be ready for saving onto your hard drive. If you're doing a lot of scans, the machine will sequentially number the files and save them in a folder of your choice.
The user interface works reasonably well most of the time, but it's feels as though it was written about 10 years ago, and has never been properly updated, just tweaked a bit here and there. Once you've got the measure of it, it's pretty simple to use, but it occasionally hangs up, and needs shutting down and restarting, and the whole feel of it is not very comfortable. It's a bit like going back to Windows 95 after using XP. I suspect the scanner would be a whole lot quicker if this piece of software was improved, as it feels like the scanner is waiting for the PC a lot of the time.
However, despite this, I'm still happy to give this scanner an 'Excellent' rating, not least because it's done such a good job with our wedding photos. I'm now working my way through all my old 35mm films, and the scanner is whirring away as I'm writing this review......